We discuss Statkraft’s withdrawal from floating wind projects in Norway, Valero’s $23 million Series A funding, and the varying quality of blade repairs in the field. The Babbitt Ranch wind farm is this week’s Wind Farm of the Week.

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You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here’s your hosts. Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. 

Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

I have Phil Totaro from California and Joel Saxum down in Austin, Texas. And Rosemary Barnes will join us shortly from the Southern Hemisphere. Uh, a number of news articles this week that we want to talk about Stack Craft. Let’s lead off there, up in Norway. So Norwegian energy giant Stack Craft has announced it will withdraw from the upcoming floating wind tenor for the U Sierra North area as part of a broader cost cutting strategy.

Stack craft’s early announcement and may stop New green Hydrogen developments signaling a strategic shift toward more immediately profitable renewable energy investments fill. Does this slow down some of the offshore wind work, particularly up in Norway, and it does seem like. Floating will be the future here, but if Stack craft’s not gonna be involved and it’s right in their backyard, uh, what does this say to the industry?

If they can work out with their military, you know, the radar interference and all that, uh, there’s no reason they shouldn’t want this capacity because it’s, you know, power that they can use to balance their hydro and power that they can offload to, you know, other Scandinavian countries because there’s plenty of transmission already and they’re, they’re already.

Planning on building more. So, um, it’s just whether or not they have the appetite to put the market mechanisms in place to, to actually support these, uh, you know, these, these tenders. 

Joel Saxum: I think appetite’s the right term here, Phil, when you say that because, uh, you know, and as the CEO is saying in this, in this article we’re getting, we’re gonna focus more on near term profitable technologies.

There’s not, uh, a, you know, an interconnect that works best. There’s not a turbine model that’s out there that this is the one, this is what we run with. You don’t have support from major OEMs like, you know, oh, do we pick a Siemens one or a Vestas one, a GE one for offshore? Like we have for fixed bottom offshore.

So I get it like in, in, you know, we’re in a stress capital market where we’re still sitting on high interest rates and, and everybody wants to do something that’s more profitable for them. That’s proven right now, um, in my mind is a good strategy. You know, it would be, you don’t want ’em to pull out of it.

You would love to see some of the, the big guys put some of their r and d budgets and keep this floating thing moving. ’cause that’s a good move for the future. But. I mean, it’s all about making money and, and, and de-risking yourself. So like it’s understandable. 

Green Volt, right? Yeah. Green Volt. Right. And I’m wondering if CRA feels. Like the technology isn’t developed as far as they would like it to be, and companies like Farrun, which are really heavily involved in floating, are going to do the dirty work and then everybody else is gonna follow behind their lead.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, that could be right. Because that’s what, that’s what’s needed. Someone needs to go and put the money in this and, but it’s going to be risky. Right? So it’s what’s your, what’s your risk appetite? Um, and if we’re talking about risk and offshore wind, I mean, we’ve seen what’s happened in the last six months, a year, so someone has to really.

Allen Hall: Well, Gros at the minute is it’s discussing what type of term they wanna put offshore. This is where the Ing Yang discussion comes into play, because rag is. I don’t know if they’ve selected them or down selected Bing Yang as one of the potential providers of turbines, but that’s created a lot of chaos, at least temporarily in the UK because the United States is super concerned about a Chinese wind turbine off the 

Phil Totaro: coastline of the uk.

Joel was talking about de-risking, uh, and originally for this project, stat Craft was partnered with uh, ocean Winds, which is, um. Uh, EDPR and Eng g and Acre, uh, which was originally mainstream offshore when they originally, um, started making the, the bids and those two, uh, other groups or three technically, if you know, um, Eng G and, and EDPR.

With them at that point. So I think, you know, them pulling the plug, it’s, it’s almost like what happened. Um, you know, when, uh, with the Atlantic Shores project in the United States, you know, when, when one partner pulls out, the other partner can’t really make it a go, so the other partner is gonna pull the plug and then the whole project is basically dead.

So. That’s just what happens. Unfortunately, when you’re not able to de-risk the project 

Now, each developer was awarded 1.5 gigawatts of capacity. Which is quite a bit in their respective development areas for an annual option fee of 350 pounds per megawatt. And the Crown Estate launched this fifth offshore wind leasing round in February of last year. Originally offering three areas with up to 4.5 gigawatts total capacity.

This is a big deal because you’re bringing in Ecuador and E-D-F-E-S-B. And it’s going to really expand the amount of energy produced from Floating Winds. So, although, um, stack Craft is not gonna be involved up north off the coast of Norway, a bunch of developers are gonna be really involved off the coast of the uk.

Phil Totaro: Yeah, I mean, France has had, you know, a couple of demonstration projects now, um, for a little while, and they just got their first kind of, people still refer to it as kind of pre-commercial.

It’s like 30 megawatts worth of, uh, floating offshore capacity now with, uh. A small, small project. Um, and the second one’s on the way, uh, Japan’s been investigating floating foundation technology. We’ve even had some, some stuff here in the States with the University of Maine looking at this. I mean, everybody’s been looking at floating for 15 years.

Um, but the reality of it is, it’s. There’s plenty of technical solutions out there. None of them have achieved commercial viability yet because nobody’s been willing to invest in scaling it up. Um, and the fact that we haven’t really directly involved the oil and gas companies who have, you know, abundant experience with tension like platforms, uh.

So it, it’s always been a bit head scratching the way that the industry’s gone about floating, but. Absolutely. You know, the, the uk um, France and Japan are probably the three likeliest candidates to, to do the majority of the risk reduction on, uh, that technology platform that’s gonna allow it to scale up and, and become more useful in the rest of the world.

Man, when they were FFMC, they had 50,000 employees worldwide, but they do some of the largest offshore oil and gas installations around the world. Deep water, shallow water, construction, you name it. They even have their own vessels to do construction, like they’re that big. Um, and the engineering power that they have is, it’s massive.

And they’re a French company. So French, EDF, the, the Northern France kind of demonstrated projects and what it was technique energy’s invested in. Um. It was X one, wind XX one, like one of the platform things like, hey, about 10 or 20% of that thing. I don’t remember exactly what it was, maybe 15% of it. Um, but I expected some of that, like those plays to continue on some of like, you know, the SI PEs and more of like the acres and that to get involved more heavily on the, on the innovation side because that’s what they’ve done in oil and gas, right?

Allen Hall: Well, is it happening behind the scenes that we just haven’t heard of it yet? Because that’s the feeling for as much money as being poured into these projects, there must be a technical solution. At least validated on the engineering side, you’d think. I 

Joel Saxum: did see a press release just the other day. There was a company called en and EN was making a, basically what they described as A-A-U-S-B-C type connection for, for mooring and power connection for floating wind.

So it was like an in a universal, like this is how you plug it in, this is how you connect it. It mores it, it sends power controls, all this stuff. Great technology. They just had, they were just. Purchased, I think by, um, Aurora Energy Services, and Aurora is another one of those players that, that does the dev, that does a lot of dev work offshore.

So. There is some of that stuff, like you said, going on behind the scenes, Alan, I’m sure. Um, we just haven’t seen it that much. If, if anybody wants to talk, call us ’cause we would gladly have you on the podcast. 

Allen Hall: It, it does seem like there’s a number of transactions happening that are quiet, that when you piece them all together looks like a solution and I’m glad to hear it as wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial and let’s face it difficult.

That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out.

Wind speed sensor, but it uses sort of ultrasound to create a standing wave that that can then detect, uh, wind speeds very accurately. So it doesn’t have the little nanometer spinny piece to it. It, there’s no moving parts, which makes it so elegant and simple and it measures, uh, wind speed very accurately.

In fact, it can me measure wind speed’s up to Joel now. Hold on. 200 miles per hour. 

Allen Hall: Anemometer, 

Joel Saxum: they’re moving, right? It’s a moving part. Like you see ’em, like you can, you could buy the weather station for your house. It looks the same as the old school ones that are on these turbines that sit there and spin. You remove that, that o and m risk by using the FT technology sensors, right?

There’s no moving, there’s no moving parts. They’re, you know, they’re not gonna get affected by ice or snow buildup or heavy rains or like dust or like, there’s. There or lightning, there’s no bearings inside of it to go out. Right. So what we’re, what they have done here is something that we should be focusing as an industry on all things wind industry, wind energy is low maintenance, something that just goes out there and works.

And that’s what I like to see. 

Allen Hall: Well, there are OEMs that don’t use FT. Technologies. Ologies. Anemometer sensors, which is insane. Oh yeah. That would be an, that would be 

Joel Saxum: in a turbine, RFP if I was writing one. 

Wind measurements? I, Joel, you and I’ve seen it, and you go to the OM buildings, a lot of times there’s a whole pile of broken anemometers on the, of the spinning kind, because they either fail from lightning or the bearings have gone bad or something has happened. Why would you even mess with it? Just buy the right technology.

It’s proven that they’ve been around a long time. Ft. Technologies read the article. Go to PES Wind. Download your copy of PES Wind UH, magazine. You won’t regret it. Swiss Aero Robotics Company, Valero has raised $23 million in series A funding to scale. Its autonomous inspection robots for industrial infrastructure.

And then it can apply force on sensors, which you totally need so it can replace a technician, the. The approach is really slick. $23 million is a lot of money. That, that’s would say there’s, uh, a reasonable growth, a reasonable growth pattern for Valero to receive that kind of funding. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah, absolutely. I visited the team, like you said last, uh, I think it was last spring.

I was over in their offices in, in Zurich there. Um, and I’ll tell you what, $23 million is gonna go a long ways for this team. They had, they had a great office, uh, set up with kind of the front office meeting spaces and a lot of tech room, right? A ton of space for developers. A really cool glass enclosed kind of, um, test facility where you could watch the tests real time as a, as a viewer through glass.

Fantastic. They can also do NDT, but we’re just talking about wind ’cause that’s what we like ’em from. They do a lot of things for all kinds of industrial inspections. So oil and gas, uh, traditional power, you name it, manufacturing facilities. Um, they can inspect it all. So, uh, kudos to the team over there.

Uh, I know they’ve been making some inroads into the states. We’ve heard a lot about, uh, some of the LPS testing they’ve done in the wind sector. Um, and yeah, like I said, $23 million is a lot of money gonna go a long ways for these guys, so, so congratulations. 

Allen Hall: Where do you think the majority of their income is gonna come from now?

Is it gonna come from oil and gas and all the measurements they’re doing on steel tanks and, and that sort of. Product. 

So it’s a platform. You can put a phase array unit, you can put a different, you know, single, single phase unit on it. You can put all kinds of different technologies and they are actively integrating all kinds of different technologies because if you know anything in a non-destructive testing space. Um, it’s all about like, Hey, we’ve got this problem.

We need this type of kit. We got this problem, we need this type of kit. You know, we need to be able to see through, uh, paint coating. So we need phased array. We need, we’re on bare steel so we can use this. We’re on a composite, so we need this. And they’ve done a really good job at setting that system up to be able to utilize all of those technologies.

Um, so yeah, I think that they’ll. And let’s be honest, oil and gas companies pay more. So that’s a good space to be in. 

Joel Saxum: Don’t forget 20 million for Sky Specs last fall either. Exactly. So you’re seeing Sky Skys specs with new drone technology. They’ve got the new four site drone out. They’ve got their internal crawlers moving. Eros has got internal crawler Gen three I think it is. Plus all the crazy things that they’re doing.

Robotics, LEP, blade repair, AI integration, really cool stuff. So Y Combinator, of course, if you’re in the startup space or startup networks, you kind of know Y Combinator, they’re, they’re cream of the crop type platform to launch. They put out a list every year that says, this is what we’d like to see from people applying to the Y Combinator.

That is a larger trend in the investment world. What 

Allen Hall: do you think the market cap is for the robotic repair business? In wind alone, it depends who cracks the ability to do cat five repairs first. You think that’s gonna be the marker? 

Joel Saxum: I think if you can c if you can, if you can s ’cause right now you can’t do a robot as it sits today.

I don’t care whose robot it is, cannot do everything a technician can do. So you still need technicians and that will be a, that, that will be that way for a while. I, I think, um, it’s going to be hard to get to the point where we’re doing cat five robotic repairs. Um, I think it’s gonna happen for sure. I think probably Aeros is the closest.

Right? But once you can do that, 

Joel Saxum: Well, I think that’s everybody’s solution, right? Everybody would like to do that.

Catch it at Cat two and three. 

Allen Hall: The problem with the Cat two, cat three catches that you just don’t have enough technicians to go out and do it, and the the pricing isn’t right. And I, we might as well discuss it because it’s the, um, discussion of Weather Guard at the minute is. How much quality is going into some of these repairs in the states?

I, I will leave, I will leave the rest of the world out of it for a minute. I think in the United States the quality varies quite a bit and, and the composite repairs, I’m not supremely confident, uh, that we’re getting the. Best repairs that we could for the money we’re spending. Maybe that’s the way to phrase it.

Allen Hall: I don’t think that’s it, Phil. I, I think it’s a skill level and just a knowledge. 

Joel Saxum: I, it’s, so, so that’s what I wanna bring, uh, I’m gonna mention our friend Alfred Crabtree Blade Blade Repair Academy, because he knows a ton of this stuff, right? And he’s told me, you know, basically for someone on ropes or someone in the field.

Five years is about max. You see someone that’s been on ropes for seven, eight years, they’re a dinosaur, right? So, but, but now let’s, let’s switch that to, uh, and something simple that we all understand. A car, a car repair technician. So you bring your vehicle in to get fixed. A lot of times that technician’s been wrenching for 15, 20 years.

This, this gentleman was fantastic. Met him in the field. He walked out out of their, uh, rope access exclusion zone, did a JSA before we even approached it was, he was awesome. However, second year technician and he was doing a CAT four repair. Uh, that to me is like, whew. 

Allen Hall: It’s a little scary. And, and in Europe they don’t tend to treat it that way.

They’re, it tends to be a much longer cycle of working in wind turbine and blade repair. You see a lot of technicians come over from Europe that have. More than five years, generally speaking, and those are, the technicians get assigned to these more complicated tasks. 

Rosemary Barnes: There’s a huge difference in working conditions between the US and Europe.

So he took a job in Sweden instead. So he would be able to see his family in America more because he got, you know, six weeks annual leave and a lot of public holidays and, and all that sort of thing. Proper sick leave as well. Um, and you know, they are actually in Europe worried about your, um. Y you, you know, making sure that you don’t wear your body out in, in four or five years doing a hard job.

You know, they, um, it’s still hard work there. It’s not like it’s ever gonna be an easy job, but in general, they care more about making sure that you don’t get sick from work and even often that you enjoy your work. You know, like that, that, that’s actually an important, um, thing. So we can argue about, um, where Europe is at relative to the US in terms of, um.

Allen Hall: Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs, ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive, time consuming problems. From ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment in internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late.

Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. 

Phil Totaro: Alan asked the question before, how big is this market? If you’re just talking about inspections, that’s a few hundred million a year. But like Joel mentioned, if you’re talking about being able to do repairs all the way up through Cat four and eventually cat five, that’s gonna end up being worth, you know, several billion.

Joel Saxum: I, I think Alan, you, you started this conversation about, you know, what are we seeing in the field and is it, is it up to snuff? And I got, I gotta say in generally no, from my seat, no.

Um, I don’t, I don’t think that, yeah, I don’t think that we’re getting the best quality in the field that we, we should in general, 

Allen Hall: which opens up the door to robots. 

Rosemary Barnes: I do anecdotally, um, hear people, you know, concerned that the same blade that was repaired a couple of years ago is now having a repair in. A very similar place and, um, you know, but no one’s ever, no one’s ever really sure if that’s the exact same problem or something similar because they don’t document well enough.

There’s no. There’s no reason not to. It’s not faster really to do a, um, you know, a bad repair than a, a good one. Um, well, I mean, I guess it depends on what kind of bad repair you do. You, you could, you could do, you, you could just whack a bandaid over the top instead of grinding away. I guess that would be a, would be faster.

But anyway, that aside, like, I, I don’t, I don’t think that there’s any problem with that per se, but the implementation of it, if it’s not right, then you could see problems. You don’t. Want processes that mean that you have to rely on individual judgment and remembering to do the right thing and, you know, noticing something that you wouldn’t, you know, you’re not told to notice in the work instruction.

Joel Saxum: But it’s, it’s the same, it’s the same breath too, Rosemary like, that’s great technician wise, but that means that that engineer who designed the process needs to be properly educated, knowledgeable about it and the process.

I can almost guarantee you at these ISPs that there’s not a process engineer reviewing the qa, QC methodology and stuff. It’s kinda like, this is just how we do it. 

Rosemary Barnes: The repairs should be certified. What 

Joel Saxum: does, what does it, what does that, what does that mean? 

Rosemary Barnes: It means that the, yeah, the repair method has been certified to bring the blade back up to design intent.

Allen Hall: OEM won’t even share the instructions. Right? They won’t even tell you what the layup is. The materials, it’s definitely not happening. 

Rosemary Barnes: And then for, um, small, small repairs, then, you know, you don’t need OEM involvement. There’s just, you know, like there’s standard, uh, you know, like, um, chafer angles and there’s lots of, lots of standards involved in how much you need to overlap and, and all that sort of thing.

And if you can’t do that, then, you know, that’s, um, yeah, that’s a big risk you’re taking and I hope people are doing that mindfully, uh, to, you know, the money that they’re saving by going that route is, um, worth the risk that that adds. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah, a lot of ’em are basically like, once you get a, a cohort to agree, like, ah, the ISPs engineer says this is how we should do it, and this is how we’ve done it in the past.

And someone from the asset owner says, that looks about right. That’s, uh, what I think we could do too. And they go, all right, 

Allen Hall: do it. Are we measuring the quality out in the field somehow? 

I think that would be like a really good step to see if you’ve got a problem. I don’t think that you can really start to tell if you’ve got a problem until you’re at least tracking where the, um. Where the damages are across your fleet and doing Let some, you are gonna need some sort of statistical analysis to see if what you’re seeing is, um, random chance or if something is going on.

Allen Hall: Isn’t that what Skys Spec’s Horizon system is doing is tracking repairs and then looking in the future because they’re doing all the inspections, they can see if that repair is held up or not. And I wonder if there’s any numbers. On the amount of repairs that have failed over time. 

Joel Saxum: I’m sure I, I think at the bigger operators, the more advanced ones, right?

They’re not gonna warranty a failure, but they’ll warranty something in general that when you start to track that, that. That metric of cost, support quality on a commercial side, then you start to see, okay, if we do have an engineering problem or not, you can track it that way. So it’s a, it’s a checks and balances, judicial, legislative kind of thing, right?

Where the commercial side can check the engineering side. And if the engineering side hasn’t been checking themselves, um, that COPQ is a good metric to watch it. 

And it might not be like factory restored and factory certifiable like Rosie’s talking about, but it’ll be good enough to be able to, to get the turbine back up and running because at the end of the day, they care about availability, not about the quality of a repair or, or if they’re comparing the two, that the availability is always gonna win.

Allen Hall: Joel and I have been talking to a couple of people about this when the production tax credit finally rolls off and Repowering stops at 10 years. Does that change, that type of repair where they’ll just put a, a bandaid on it to get to the 10 years and replace the blade set? 

Phil Totaro: Yeah. ’cause then you need ROI outta your blade, your repairs a hundred percent.

Because some Repowering is just, if they don’t have the full value of the PTC, they can’t do the repowering. So that means they’re gonna either have to life extend, they’re gonna end the project either early or you know, at the planned end of asset life. And that’s gonna be about it. Um, and you’re gonna hope that you get something.

I, I, I think the reason that we’ll see some life extension is because asset owners are gonna wanna try to wait it out to get to the, another Congress that’s gonna extend the PTC again. And that’s what everybody’s kind of banking on at this point. Let’s just play this out 

Allen Hall: just for a minute because I, I wanna go back to the market cap discussion.

If PTC rolls off and the repowering rolls off. Does a market cap for robotics then go up significantly? 

That all of a sudden, uh oh, we’re not gonna be able to repower these things and we gotta run ’em for 20 more years. And there’s a couple companies out here that have assets that have been around the, a lot of assets that have been there. Constellation is one. They have a lot of assets that were COD oh 8 0 9 2011 2012.

They’ve been running them for a long time without repower. That someone like that may be someone to look at, to say like, what’s the strategy here for the long-term play? Because it could change y. 

Phil Totaro: Yeah. Although they also have PPAs that are like 40, 50, 60 bucks a megawatt hour. If you only have like a $20 megawatt hour PPA, then you’re probably not.

Joel Saxum: the week this week is Babbit Ranch, which is a next era and Salt River project, which is, um, and this is kind of going back to, we were at a CP over in Phoenix.

This wind farm is north of Flagstaff. You don’t see a lot of wind farms up there. Um, but it’s got some cool factoids about it, right? So it’s uh, 50 ge, 3.4 megawatt, one 40 ma rotor machines, and it is on a ranch that’s been in a family operation since 1886, which is pretty cool. Uh, the timeline, uh, looks like initial announcement of this farm was in January 22.

Balancing ranching conservation and innovation. So they’ve been looking into wind energy and, uh, renewable energies on this ranch for a while, and they finally pulled the trigger. Um, and part of it is, uh, the, the Salt River Project is the local, uh, power consumption company, but they’re also going to be a Google data center, uh, in the same space.

So. Wind center’s gonna make about nine and a half million dollars in tax revenue, uh, along with 250 temporary construction jobs, which is pretty cool. Um, and it’s gonna power some data centers, which helps Google’s, uh, net zero emissions goals as well. So the Babbitt Ranch, wind Farm up in or down in Arizona.

You’re the wind farm of the week.